Pro Wrestling Books

An ambitious undertaking, this feels like at least three different books and none of them quite hit the mask. On paper, this is a biography of Rikidozan, but it opens with a list of names from Rick Santorum to Chris Benoit that trails some significant departures into wider wrestling history, decades after the subject’s death. It’s also a exploration of the societal effects of Rikidozan being a Korean man who not only downplayed his he...

Pro wrestling is a fictional world that exists in, is performed by people from, and blurs the lines with the real world. That’s an obvious statement, but one that creates a rich seam for exploration, which is what Lords of the Ring attempts to do. The book stems from a mid-2010s podcast series in which Higgins explored the intersection between pro wrestling and real world events and culture. In as much as there is a consistent theme to the ...

A tale of big dreams and personalities in a small world, this captures the unique way in which professional wrestlers are both partners and rivals across multiple levels of reality. After some quick cuts of perspective at the start (illustrating the multiple layers of illusion and interpretation in pro wrestling), the book settles into the parallel stories of two wrestling trainees at a local school run by a former star. It’s set in and aro...

A wrestling referee is simultaneously absolutely core to the performance and illusion, and yet somewhat on the fringes of the industry, not quite part of the inner core but not an outsider. It’s a unique vantage point on a unique industry. Before going further, there is an elephant in the room to address, which I was unsure how to handle in this review. I concluded the most appropriate course is to simply state that Levin left the wrestling bus...

A hugely pleasant surprise, this is something of a sleeper hit on a subject that would not top most people’s lists of obvious wrestling book subjects. The Bahamas, specifically Nassau on the island of New Providence, was largely an outpost for US wrestling territories. Just 180 miles from Miami it was actually closer than many other stops on the Florida territory, albeit requiring a plane ride. Indeed, the bulk of its heyday shows were as a...

A tale of two well-documented men, this brings together two entwined lives in a new form. Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks straddles the lines between multiple approaches — biographies of two individuals, a history of a wrestling era, a specific rivalry, and one high-profile event — in a way that has many of the advantages of each without becoming unfocused. The book brings together material from existing books and news articles, plus ori...

If you saw a WWF commercial in the 90s or 2000s, or a TNA/IMPACT video package in the past 20 years, it was probably produced by David Sahadi, who is good at his job and well regarded by his peers. Now you’ve read that, you don’t really need to read this book. It’s somewhat baffling who this is really aimed at. The first two-thirds covers his WWF run and it feels like 90% of it is simply a complete word-by-word, shot-by-shot bre...

Kesar is better known as WWE’s Karrion Kross, but this is not a pure autobiography. It’s somewhere between a life story and a self-help book, but it may be too much of a blend of formats to find wide appeal. Perhaps the most similar previous wrestling title is Bobby Heenan’s second book, but that was more explicit about tying life lessons to moments in Heenan’s career. This explores Kesar’s wider life story, includin...

Think more the Channel 4 version of Fighting With My Family than the Hollywood remake and you’ll be closer to the feel of this no holds barred book. Explaining the movie to some non-wrestling fan viewers, I noted that while much of the story may have been fictionalised, everything that happened before Saraya/Paige’s move to to the US certainly felt like something that was believable, if not true. This book, which shows no signs of ton...

A mixed bag by its very nature, this part-history, part-travelogue covers a wide range of aspects of the WWF’s national expansion. The book has its origins in the early 2000s when Balukjian began work ghostwriting the Iron Sheik’s autobiography before their professional relationship broke down. Two decades later he decided to adapt the project as a follow-up to The Wax Pack, in which he attempted to track down every player in a pack o...